The Four Loves is a book by C. S. Lewis which explores the nature of love from a Christian perspective through thought experiments. The content of the examination is prefaced by Lewis' admission that he initially mistook St. John's words "God is Love" as a simple beginning point to address the topic. But further meditation revealed two different kinds of love: "need-love" as distinguished from "gift-love" . Lewis happened upon the insight that the natures of even these basic categorizations of love are more complicated than they seem at first. As a result of this, he formulates the... foundation of his topic by exploring the nature of pleasure, and then divides love into four categories , based in part on the four Greek words for love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Lewis states that just as Lucifer—a former archangel—perverted himself by pride and fell into depravity, so too can love—commonly held to be the arch-emotion—become corrupt by presuming itself to be what it is not.
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| Author: | C. S. Lewis |
| Genre: | Philosophy |
| Year published: | 1960 |
| Number of editions: | 3 |